Dear Bunmi, my husband and I met at the university and we’ve been married for over 15 years.

He is a very successful businessman and I am a qualified accountant and hold a very high position in the firm of accountants I work for.

What Nigerian husband is perfect? But my husband has never openly flaunted his relationship and I’ve always observed the “see no evil, hear no evil” doctrine in my marriage.

However, an incident happened recently that completely blew my mind.

As I breezed into the office one morning, everyone in the main office kept quiet and looked surreptitiously at me.

It was a bit embarrassing, as most of the junior officers used to compliment me on the clothes I wore or anything they thought would flatter me. It was all harmless fun.

As soon as I settled in, I called for one of the workers I was really close to. She knew why I might have called and quietly placed a photocopy of a juicy news item about my husband and his girlfriends on my table.

Dear Bunmi, it was from one of the rag sheets. Everyone had a copy, she told me solemnly. I got hotter and hotter as I read the story.

Like I said, my husband is no saint, but the lurid details of his escapades were most embarrassing indeed!

He denied the allegations as I knew he would. He said nobody took the rag sheets seriously these days and that I should simply ignore anything they wrote.

But I knew about one of the girls the article referred to. He is the least of my problems.

But how do I handle the workers in my office so that they should stop pitying me?

Joke, by e-mail.

Dear Joke,

It is a good thing you have one or two sympathetic ears among the junior workers.

By now, your colleagues would have noticed changes in your mood because of your efforts to pretend nothing bothers you.

Tell these confidants that you’d known all along about your husband’s carrying-ons and are trying to sort things out.

You can’t joke about a thing like this not bothering you! Yet, you shouldn’t let it affect your office environment where you find some sort of job satisfaction.

As soon as they realise you’re not going to have a nervous breakdown, your colleagues would relax too.

It is about time you had a serious talk with your philandering husband.Discretion should be the better part of valour.

It’s bad enough he has affairs, but reading about them anywhere is stretching your tolerance to the extreme. 

Vanguard News